If the architect or
master of the house had chosen to place the store-room or treasury on
the ground floor, the ladder or steps would have been useless. The life
is divided between the rewards and punishments on the one hand, and the
hope and fear on the other: namely, the active life or excitancy belongs
to the former, the passive life or excitability to the latter. Call the
former the afficients, the latter the affections, the deeds being merely
the signs or impresses of the former, as the seal, on the latter as the
wax. Equally evident is it, that the affections are wholly formed by the
deeds, which are themselves but the lifeless unsubstantial shapes of the
actual forms ('formae formantes'), namely, the rewards and punishments.
Now contrast with this the process of the Gospel. There the affections
are formed in the first instance, not by any reference to works or
deeds, but by an unmerited rescue from death, liberation from slavish
task-work; by faith, gratitude, love, and affectionate contemplation of
the exceeding goodness and loveliness of the Saviour, Redeemer,
Benefactor: from the affections flow the deeds, or rather the affections
overflow in the deeds, and the rewards are but a continuance and
continued increase of the free grace in the state of the soul and in the
growth and gradual perfecting of that state, which are themselves gifts
of the same free grace, and one with the rewards; for in the kingdom of
Christ which is the realm of love and inter-community, the joy and grace
of each regenerated spirit becomes double, and thereby augments the joys
and the graces of the others, and the joys and graces of all unite in
each;--Christ, the head, and by his Spirit the bond, or unitive 'copula'
of all, being the spiritual sun whose entire image is reflected in every
individual of the myriads of dew-drops.
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